Scattered Pearls

  Now we repeated the process, this time with the twins at child care at the university, and Shirin at school. It was such a busy time that I remember rarely thinking more than one day ahead; I lived in constant anxiety that one of the children would be sick and I would have to miss or be late for a lecture. Again, the course was challenging and I had to work really hard. I remember analysing Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, about a woman who had everything but herself, and who finally finds herself. Her story was different from mine but her search for purpose inspired me – I got the best mark in the class on this essay. I would spend hours in the library between classes, then study on Saturday and Sunday afternoons while Deirdre or Fariba or my parents or someone else watched the kids. By now Fariba had finished her studies and was working at a nursing home in Frankston. She was (and remains to this day) such a wonderful aunt to my children, always providing them with unconditional love, not to mention many unexpected gifts.

  When the exams came around I was as nervous as I had ever been, and then of course I had to wait for my results. But I passed, with good marks and letters of recommendation from two of my lecturers. Now I was ready to finally go through those doors at the School of Law.

  But they weren’t ready for me.

  A month after applying to transfer from arts, I received a letter declining my application. I was so upset. Fariba was with me that day and asked why I was so distressed. When I explained she told me not to worry – arts was as good as law. I said no. I must do law.

  I wrote to the school. There must have been some sort of mistake as I was sure that this time I had done everything required of me. I rang the school and finally the admissions officer, a Mrs Wilson, agreed to see me. She asked me why I wanted to study law. I told her my reasons, explaining that I would not be the same as someone coming straight out of school – I was so driven to help women avoid what I had been through. This, I said, was my main motivation. I also told her that I was determined to get into law, and that if it wasn’t this year then it would be next.

  Mrs Wilson said that my grades in arts were good, and that my letters of recommendation were impressive. She asked me to wait on the balcony outside her office while she consulted with a colleague. It was a beautiful day but I could hardly breathe while I waited. Eventually Mrs Wilson asked me back into her office. She said that on reconsideration they were happy to give me a chance, and hoped that one day I would play an important role in the lives of Iranian women.

  As I left the School of Law that day I felt like I was on the set of a movie. The walls were lined with pictures of judges; the library shelves were stacked high with the thickest leather- bound books. Only it wasn’t a movie, and I was no longer a visitor here. From now on I would be a student in this place. Step two completed.

  Driving home I danced behind the wheel to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s radio. I screamed with joy when I got back to Hartwell Court, dancing on the table to a Michael Jackson song. The kids danced with me, though they stayed on the floor!

  ~

  If my previous studies had been hard work, law was slavery. The challenge of working in English was bad enough, but the material was so, so complex. Even the most basic concepts were foreign to me: where Australia operates an adversarial legal system (essentially ‘innocent until proven guilty’), Iran operates an inquisitorial system (roughly the opposite).

  Military precision returned to our household. The twins were still pre-schoolers, and while Ali and Shirin could get themselves home after school I still wanted to be there to meet them each day. The only exercise I could get was walking rapidly from the university car park to the Law School. I felt I was always running: home to university, university to home. I would go to university wearing whatever I’d pulled on that morning – mostly tracksuit pants and a jumper. My hair was tied straight back and I wore no makeup. What a blessing it was not to have time to look in the mirror! Life was simple on many levels, which allowed it to be productive. I was working so late into the night that I decided to move a mattress out into the living room. That way I could take a nap whenever I needed one.

  Somehow I managed to never miss a lecture, even if one of the children was sick, though I probably did push a few boundaries. One winter Ali, Sima and Mina all came down with the chickenpox. After taking them to the doctor to confirm my diagnosis, I took them back home and put them to bed. I raced to university, took a class, then returned straight home. Thankfully, they were all still tucked up.

  At exam times the pressure mounted further but somehow I managed to get through . . . mostly.

  In the second semester of 1995, my third year, I failed both Constitutional Law and Equity and Trust. I would have to repeat both subjects. I decided that I would do this over the coming summer, while also studying the two subjects I had already planned for that time. That summer I cried and studied, cried and studied. My classes were in the mornings, so I put the twins into child care, and Ali and Shirin would either stay in bed or come with me. My neighbours also helped a lot. Our Christmas dinner that year would be McDonald’s – or at least it was going to be until my next door neighbour Silvana noticed and asked us to join her family, where we had a lovely time. The end of summer came and with it four three-and-a-half-hour exams. My heart still pounds at the memory of going to the university a few weeks later to check my results on the board. The new subjects I passed without a problem. The repeats? I got exactly 50 per cent for each – enough to pass!

  The final subject of my degree, held the following summer, was a ‘moot court’ exercise – a pretend court. It was the case of a boy who had jumped over a fence to retrieve a ball and been bitten by a dog. I represented the boy. At one point I became so flustered that instead of saying ‘Objection, your honour’, I said, ‘Objection, your dog’. It took some minutes for the ‘judge’ to regain control of his court as it descended into laughter while I stood blushing and waiting for quiet. Nevertheless, I passed this subject with a distinction and, with it, completed my degree. At the end of the course I couldn’t stop myself from crying. Finally I had finished this thing I had striven for for so long.

  On my graduation day in 1997, all my children came with me (where mostly it was parents attending the graduation of one of their children). I was so proud. And someone else seemed to agree because when they drew a name for the prize of a teddy bear, guess who won?

  Now all I needed to do was find a job.

  ~

  As any lawyer knows, practising law isn’t as simple (or incredibly difficult) as gaining a university qualification. After your degree, you need to do ‘articles’ – essentially an on-the-job apprenticeship inside a legal firm. And to do that, you need to find a firm willing to take you on. For me, this proved even more difficult than getting into the Monash Law School.

  Over my last year at university I submitted 52 applications to law firms, large and small, inside and outside Melbourne. I got one interview. And it was a four-and-a-half-hour drive away in Morwell, a regional Victorian city. As I had nothing else I made the drive out there but it came to nothing. I think the partners of this medium-sized firm were concerned about whether it would work with my having to move so far with my family. They chose someone else.

  I was left with nothing. I was a mature-age graduate with four children who had achieved average grades and knew no one in an industry in which ‘who you know’ is very important. At one point I became so frustrated that I wrote a letter to Michael Kirby, then a Justice of the High Court of Australia. I have no idea what I expected him to do for me. In the end he wasn’t able to help, but he did write back and wished me luck, which made me very happy.

  All through that final year I would check the noticeboards in the law school. In November I noticed an advertisement on the board from someone looking for the assistance of a law graduate. He was setting up a legal brokerage and promised earnings of $1000 per week. When I told my sister Frooshad about this promise she was immediately suspicious about whether it was a real job.
But I really had no choice, so I decided to go and see him.

  The address was an apartment in South Yarra, not far from where I had first lived with Reza over 15 years earlier. I rang the intercom, went up the elevator and met a young man called Yuri. His apartment was very smartly decorated in all black and white, while he himself wore a perfectly ironed white shirt and red tie. He was sitting behind a large glass desk on a high-backed leather chair. I felt very plain by comparison; I’d worn a simple black skirt with a blouse and was not even wearing any makeup.

  Yuri asked me about myself and then explained his business idea, which was to offer companies a service whereby we would refer them to the appropriate lawyer to meet any specific need they had. There would be no cost to the company; Prime Law Brokers (the name of his business) would charge a marketing fee to the lawyer for our service. My job would be to make cold calls to companies with the aim of setting up appointments for Yuri. I would be paid a commission based on the earnings from every client I initiated.

  Immediately I could see an opportunity. It wasn’t about the money, but I would be in direct contact with many legal firms. Surely, eventually, there would be a chance for me to do my articles with one of them. I told Yuri that if he took me on I would do whatever was needed to make Prime Law Brokers a success.

  It was a week before I heard anything, but finally Yuri called and said he wanted to give me a go. He asked if I could come in on the following Sunday and we would practise making some calls. There would be two other people, one of them being Tamara, who was a friend of his. When I got off the phone I was jumping up and down. I had a job! I had a job!

  Oh, but how hard this job turned out to be.

  The first problem was that I did not have the right sort of voice for the telephone. English was still very much my second language, and I found that when I was on the phone I tended to speak too quickly. My voice also rose, becoming high pitched and, at least in Yuri’s eyes, unprofessional. On top of those problems, I had a habit of leaving sentences incomplete which, again, was unprofessional.

  The second problem, which became clearer when I started making real calls, was that I had no experience at all in dealing with clients, and certainly none with sales. In all my previous work I had been behind the scenes, well away from my employers’ customers. My education hadn’t helped either. During my law course I had spent time in community legal centres as a volunteer, but even then I never spoke to clients. I just wrote letters and did other tasks to assist the qualified lawyers. Now I had to engage with people who weren’t expecting my call and, mostly, did not want to hear from me.

  It very soon became clear that I would need to make many, many calls in order to get any appointments. But I was able to work from home. In the end I made 200 calls and managed to get four appointments. My next phone bill, however, was three times higher than normal and I had never thought to ask about this cost. I also faced the expense of buying myself a business suit, which I would need to attend the meetings I’d set up.

  The next time I went to Yuri’s home office I was wearing a sleek Italian-style black dress by Cue I had bought on sale. I also wore high heels and Levante stockings and was carrying a leather bag. I wore lipstick but no other makeup, as had always been my habit. For the first time since the early 1980s I felt like a professional. Yuri looked very surprised. Was this the same person? When I asked him about my phone calls he explained that I would get 20 per cent of any fees earned from these potential new clients. I felt very stupid: I thought it was going to be $20.

  As it turned out those leads came to nothing and we were back to square one. After another week of fruitless cold calling I was ready to give up. I started looking for jobs again.

  Two or three weeks later I had a call from Yuri. He had a new idea. Could I come in the next day?

  I was so happy I could not sleep. I wrote in my diary that finally God had plans for me.

  Yuri’s new idea was that we would offer law broking to the general public. He organised advertising in the Yellow Pages alongside the lawyers. When the next issue of the phone book was published in a few months’ time, people would be able to call in, explain the situation that caused them to need a lawyer and then we would refer them, at no cost, to someone with the right speciality – family law, criminal law and so on. It was Prime Law Brokers for the masses. Most of the work would happen at Yuri’s apartment, where I would work alongside Tamara, answering the phone, recording client details and entering them into a computer.

  We had more training sessions, this time receiving mock calls from the public rather than making cold calls to companies. Yuri became frustrated that my voice was still too high and that again I was speaking too quickly. When I did get the greeting right – ‘Prime Law Brokers, how may I help you?’ – I was concentrating so hard that I would forget to ask an important question, such as whether the caller would be able to afford legal assistance. By the end of the first day I was exhausted – and I felt humiliated.

  I did improve, but when the next Yellow Pages was finally distributed and the phone started to ring with ‘live’ clients, Yuri would correct me after each call. He hammered me about the way I answered the phone, or the way I spoke to clients, or a question I forgot to ask. When I cried at the end of a day he apologised, explaining that it was important that we get it right. When I got home that night the kids asked why my eyes were so red. ‘I am stupid,’ I said. ‘I never learn.’

  But I did learn. It did get easier. Within six months the business was busy enough that Yuri decided to rent a city office. We could see progress. Eventually I suggested to Yuri that Frooshad come and join us; by now she was studying law herself but was keen to earn some money working part time. We had some other employees come and go as well.

  Early in 1998 Yuri got married and soon after that he told me that he would be leaving Australia. He wanted me to take over the business and we came to a verbal agreement. My confidence was higher now and the business was receiving many referral requests. Further, I would be earning a much bigger slice of the income, meaning that I would finally be able to get off my sole-parent pension.

  What a change! After Yuri left, Tamara and the others also left, unconvinced that Prime would survive. I was left with just Frooshad to help me. All of a sudden I was essentially running my own business. There were five years on the lease for the city office, which really left me no choice but to make the long commute from home to the city every day. After hours I would take calls on my mobile phone, sometimes late into the night, and on weekends and holidays. In between all this I tried to run our household.

  Very soon I started to appreciate Yuri’s efforts to make me professional as it was clear there was a great opportunity for me if I could build the company. I was a great admirer of Yuri’s entrepreneurial spirit but now, left to my own devices, I discovered that somewhere inside me was some of the same flair. I started running larger ads in the Yellow Pages and this generated more and more calls, and more and more referrals. I took out a national free-call number and advertised in the Sydney and Brisbane Yellow Pages, then later in Adelaide and Perth. We also introduced referrals to accountants and financial planners. I ran radio ads as well, and even made a video ad for community television. There were quiet periods, but overall the calls continued to come, sometimes as many as 20 per hour.

  By the time the lease on our office ended it had become far too expensive to stay in the city. In late 2001 I found an office in Frankston, much closer to home. It wasn’t long after that that I moved our household to Mount Eliza.

  Because of the unique nature of what the business was doing, we attracted articles in local newspapers and also one in Melbourne’s largest selling newspaper, The Herald Sun. Eventually this attention worked against us when a solicitor in Perth complained that we were advertising under the heading of ‘Lawyers’ in the Yellow Pages, even though we weren’t actually lawyers. The legal industry can be a very closed shop and there were always some firms who were resis
tant to the idea of a brokerage.

  The Law Institute of Victoria became involved and started to pressure the Yellow Pages not to accept our advertising – something that could have closed us down almost instantly. This was despite the fact that our service cost nothing for the client and actually fed work to lawyers and legal firms, and sometimes we even referred potential clients to the Law Institute (among other government or community organisations) if we were unable to help them or if they couldn’t afford to pay a lawyer. This would become a constant legal battle for me over the coming years, costing tens of thousands of dollars to fight. Ultimately it was a battle that I would lose, though not until 2010, by which time the Yellow Pages had become more or less irrelevant anyway, supplanted by the internet. Even so, I still feel that we were poorly treated by the Law Institute.

  ~

  As our interstate advertising had started to attract increasingly more calls, by 2000 it became necessary for me to travel to the capital cities in various states to meet with law firms. I needed to meet the lawyers face to face to assess their abilities and build relationships with them so that I could confidently make referrals to them. These trips became symbolic of my shift from oppressed housewife and overburdened single mother to self-assured businesswoman.